Nation-state actors and criminals likely exploited the PHP2SHELL vulnerability before its disclosure, according to Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince. “These vulnerabilities, like the PHP vulnerabilities that were disclosed the other day, had been in the wild for years,” Prince said on the company’s third quarter earnings call. “We're going back through our logs looking for any evidence that hackers or nation-state actors or others had been using them in the past. I know that we're going to find examples of that.” That was just one of the warnings he offered on the call, among them that some of Cloudflare’s customers believe AI agents are “a bane to their business and want to keep them away.” To explain why, Prince hypothesized that he could use an agent to find him a restaurant to eat at after he finishes his day of investor relations duties. “It might go and scour the internet and look at 1,000 different restaurants' websites, pull down 1,000 different menus, and then I might choose to only go to one of those,” he said. “The problem is that 999 of those restaurants have now had a cost that is just been applied to them, but they are not getting any benefit.” The CEO admitted that web searches have always driven some low-value traffic but feels the volume of agentic activity – which Cloudflare has previously predicted will be one thousand times greater than clicks from humans – means the problem is now at a different scale. Prince also had bad news for Kubernetes aficionados, because he thinks containers might become another casualty of the agentic age. The CEO allowed that containers are “a significant improvement over bare metal or even virtual machines,” and said they fueled the growth of hyperscale clouds and mobile applications. But he thinks containers are already cooked. “The container-based architecture of the hyperscalers and neoclouds just can't keep up in a cost-effective way with the new agentic paradigms of today,” he argued, again citing the 1000:1 ratio of bot:human traffic Cloudflare expects to see online any year now. That’s a Cloudflare-centric view, because Prince pitched the company’s serverless “Workers” service as an alternative to containers. The company also offers products that can either block agents, ameliorate the cost and traffic impacts of agentic activity, or allow organizations to monetize traffic generated by AI. Prince said demand for those products is growing fast, claiming that since July 1st, “approximately five percent” of the web opted in to Cloudflare’s content protection products. The CEO said Meta is already a customer, and said Zuck’s new “Muse” agents will benefit Cloudflare by creating more agentic traffic that third parties want to tame. He also pointed to year-on-year revenue growth of 39 percent, which saw quarterly revenue reach a record $782.5 million. And he thinks there are better days ahead, due to the terrible state of security. “It may seem like the sky is falling with the number of new security vulnerabilities that have been reported over the last few weeks,” Prince said. “I wish I could tell you we were through the worst, but we're not.” He thinks Cloudflare can profit from security misery because the extent of its activities and client base mean it is “among the first to receive quiet disclosure of new vulnerabilities” and remediates them before disclosure. Investors thought this all made sense, and in after-hours trading sent Cloudflare shares up by around 15 percent, meaning it recovered and then improved on losses that it incurred earlier after major US indices dropped around four percent as investors who worry tech stocks are overvalued. ®
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